Retail giant adds Barratt chairman John Allan to its board

Tesco has hired the chairman of housebuilder Barratt, John Allan, to become its new chairman.

Allan replaces Sir Richard Broadbent, who announced he would step down after Tesco uncovered £263m in accounting errors last September.

Tesco’s management team has been overhauled in recent months, with Dave Lewis joining as chief executive of the grocer from Unilever last September.

Allan joins Tesco as it presses on with a sweeping review of its property portfolio and development pipeline and comes under pressure from the City to sell some of its sites for housing.

Tesco announced last month it plans to halve its capital expenditure to £1bn in its next financial year and also cancelled 49 planned major store developments representing 1.8 million sq ft of floor space.

In total it has been estimated the retailer is holding 4.6 million m2 of land on over 300 sites.

Last November, Goldman Sachs published a stinging report urging supermarket chains to close one in five shops and to sell sites for housing.

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